Linguistic theories and hypotheses

Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

claim that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition

theory of Indo-European origin

theory in linguistics, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, proposing that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain

proposed superfamily of Eurasian and African languages

view of linguistics

group of North West Germanic languages

proposed common ancestor to all known languages

view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth

model of language change in which a new language feature (innovation) or a new combination of language features spreads from its region of origin, affecting a gradually expanding cluster of dialects

biolinguistics hypothesis that claims a person can only achieve native-like fluency in a language before a certain age

theory of cognition

In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but has not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners. The word may be proposed, may be extremely new, or may be established only within a very limited group of people.

theory on the origins of human language

mental dictionary containing meaning, pronunciation and syntactic characteristics of words

expression coined by Hilary Putnam to refer to a linguistic theory of language acquisition which holds that at least some knowledge about language exists in humans at birth.

architecture of early generative grammar

hypothesis that humans tend to speak their father’s language, such that language distribution correlates better with (patrilineal) Y-chromosome rather than (matrilineal) mitochondrial DNA

Theory of sound changes in linguistics

linguistic theory of creole language innovations